I'm long on software engineering

Somebody asked me recently if I thought we would need more or less software engineers in the future. If it wasn't obvious form the title my answer was 'more'. They were asking in the context of AI code generation but my feelings on the matter apply fairly broadly to any flavor of "If technology X does everything we can do today, are we done for?"

I am a strong believer that no matter what technology we invent there will always be people looking to push beyond it. Short of discovering a long lost cache of magic wands there will always be people looking to push beyond the best of what we have.

I find that exciting and optimistic. It's not without it's challenges but our desire to push the envelope is one of the best things about us. (Ensuring the direction is more 'good' than 'evil' is a topic for another post).

Let's take our current situation as the example. We have software we can use to write a good chunk of the code that humans wrote last year. It's not perfect, its not free but neither was last year's code. Looking at releases like Mythos we might be on the cusp of another big shift in capability (if the stories prove true and not just marketing).

Given all that I don't think we'll suddenly be happy with last year's code replicated a million times. We'll want an initial injection of that, maybe a few more layoffs, but sooner or later our expectations and ambitions will realign to this new normal and we'll start asking for more. More than these models can deliver, faster than they can be improved without smart people at the helm.

There will be plenty of companies that are perfectly fine with last year's code. They might need less engineers. This isn't new. Companies get big, transition from features to support and stop investing as much in R&D. This was the same 'innovators dilemma' style cycle first published thirty years ago. AI hasn't fundamentally changed the pattern, even if it has made it faster.

What we will hopefully see more of is those big companies that were once startups hitting an exit scenario and releasing a new era of cashed up smart people back into the world. Mix those folks with other ambitious people and you've got a path to a new generation of companies.

Equip these future founders with tools to build bigger and bolder things and hopefully we'll see more humanity scale problems being solved (and maybe a little less B2B SaaS).